IU Jacobs School unveils its 2008 Summer Music Festival
Forty events, ranging from choral to chamber and orchestral to theatrical, fill the Summer Music Festival season planned by Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. And the headliners are both numerous and notable.
The schedule opens June 15 with the Grammy Award-winning African American female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and ends Aug. 9 with Broadway/film/concert vocalist Maureen McGovern, in collaboration with IU jazz specialist Steve Houghton, a jazz band and string ensemble.
In between, consider these illustrious talents:
• The Beaux Arts Trio, captained by one of its founders, IU’s distinguished pianist Menahem Pressler, completing more than 50 years of concert-giving with a program in the Musical Arts Center, including Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio and Schubert’s Trio No. 2 in E-Flat Major;
• The classy Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio returning for performances of Beethoven’s Opus 11 Trio, Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A Minor and Joan Tower’s “For Daniel” (violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson are prominent IU faculty members);
• Chanticleer, the renowned, 12-member male chorus that wowed a local audience last summer, coming back for another engagement;
• The Canadian Brass, with IU’s Jeff Nelsen in its midst on horn, adding Bloomington to its summer tour;
• And two string quartets, the Penderecki and Biava, favoring us with multiple concerts.
More Pressler in chamber music; recitals by pianists Edward Auer and Evelyne Brancart and jazz violinist and IU alum Sarah Caswell; concerts by David Baker and the Festival Jazz Orchestra, featuring outstanding IU alumni and faculty, the IU Symphony under Cliff Colnot and outdoor band concerts are among the summer’s other highlights.
And, of course, the Festival Orchestra will be re-constituted for three concerts in June and July, this year under the batons of Lawrence Renes, Xian Zhang and Robert Spano. Renes has widespread credentials that encompass orchestras and opera companies in the United States, Europe and Asia. Zhang, winner of the Lorin Maazel Conducting Competition, spends much of her time directing orchestral activities at the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, and Spano has led the Atlanta Symphony for the past seven years.
The Festival Orchestra — consisting of top students, faculty and guests — brings virtuosity to the Musical Arts Center along with interesting repertoire (Stravinsky’s “A Fairy’s Kiss,” Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” Ravel’s Second Suite from “Daphnis et Chloe,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade,” and contemporary composer Jennifer Higdon’s “Blue Cathedrals,” to cite examples from upcoming programs).
I’ve not mentioned opera, sadly. There’s to be no opera in the MAC from the IU Opera Theater, but, instead, the Jerry Bock musical, “She Loves Me,” last done in 2004, a summer when Opera Theater also staged “Tosca.”
Fortunately, Jacobs School choral conductor Carmen Helena Tellez and colleagues are putting together a “video-opera,” made possible by funds from New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities at Indiana University. Coming to the Buskirk-Chumley in early August, this work, “Unicamente la Verdad!” (“Only the Truth”), will, according to the project summary, “encompass elements from contemporary music, video, tabloid journalism, analytical documentary, popular Mexican music, and, of course, opera.”
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
